The deal includes an up-front payment of around $630 million and additional payments to be made subject to meeting post-closing earn-out milestones.
Edmonton, Canada-headquartered Silent-Aire specialises in the design, engineering and manufacturing of custom air systems and modular data centres for hyperscale cloud and colocation providers. Its revenue for fiscal year 2021 is expected to be around $650 million.
George Oliver, Johnson Controls chairman and CEO, said: “With Silent-Aire we have a significant opportunity to increase our focus on the data centre vertical and accelerate growth, by combining the strengths of our global scale in manufacturing and service with leading-edge innovation and a broad portfolio of technologies dedicated to serving hyperscale providers.”
Lindsey Leckelt, Silent-Aire co-CEO, said: “Silent-Aire grew up with the cloud and our DNA translates what it means to be a hyperscale data centre company. We broke through traditional design barriers that pushed energy initiatives in what led to how most hyperscale facilities are cooled and engineered today.”
The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, said Johnson Controls.
Just after this deal, it was announced that Johnson Controls would be partnering with Arm subsidiary Pelion to jointly take AI/IoT products and services to market.
“This partnership combines our deep domain expertise in healthy buildings with Pelion’s device and edge management capabilities, to usher in an era of truly smart, updatable facilities at cloud scale,” said Mike Ellis, chief customer and digital officer at Johnson Controls.
“Our OpenBlue AI capabilities at the edge will consolidate diverse points of intelligence distributed across various floors, sites or even continents into insights and actions, creating an updatable building that can self-heal and evolve over its lifespan,” said Ellis
